David Oyelowo comes out of 'Nowhere' to become star

Oct. 11, 2012
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ORG XMIT: NYOTK Actor David Oyelowo, from the film "Middle of Nowhere," poses for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Victoria Will) / Victoria Will AP

by Andrea Mandell, USA TODAY

by Andrea Mandell, USA TODAY

Last year, the British actor broke out in two big roles, as a preacher in The Help and a nefarious biotech boss in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Both films dominated the box office in August 2011.

This month, he's premiering two films back-to-back: romantic indie Middle of Nowhere (in select theaters this weekend) and erotic noir The Paperboy, which opened Friday.

His résumé continues to expand over the holidays. It's Oyelowo's voice that intones the Gettysburg Address in the first Lincoln trailer; he plays a Union cavalryman in the film, out Nov. 9. And in December, Jack Reacher, in which he stars opposite Tom Cruise, will round out his year.

This moment feels "cumulative," he says as he settles into a booth at Ye Olde Kings Head Pub, not far from the home he shares with his wife, actress Jessica Oyelowo, and their four children, ages 10 months to 10 years.

Born in the United Kingdom and raised for part of his childhood in Nigeria, Oyelowo trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Five years ago, he moved from London to L.A. with his family, and he has since found friends in the right places. After meeting Lee Daniels (Precious), Oyelowo first signed on to play Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, a Daniels project that lost funding mere months before it went into production.

When the director moved on to The Paperboy, he rewrote the character of Yardley, an aristocratic Miami Times journalist submerged in a racially charged investigation in 1960s-set Florida, as black for Oyelowo.

"He didn't want to play it at first," says Daniels. "He didn't understand it. I said, 'Look it, I told you I was working with you. My word is my word. You're working on my next film. This is my next film. You're with me.'"

"I literally remember saying to him, 'What are we doing?'" says Oyelowo, who led a prayer circle with Daniels, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Conaughey and John Cusack before one the The Paperboy's lurid sex scenes. "What we had been talking about for two years was Martin Luther King Jr. This is from heaven to hell right here. I had to really pray about it before I signed on to it."

The risk paid off. USA TODAY critic Claudia Puig lauded the film's ensemble cast, and Oyelowo has since wrapped Daniels' next film, The Butler, playing the increasingly radical son of Forest Whitaker's character, a White House butler, and Oprah Winfrey's.

On Friday, Oyelowo shows off a softer side in Middle of Nowhere, which won a tweet of praise from Winfrey on Tuesday, commending director Ava DuVernay on "an excellent job, especially with no money." In the indie, Oyelowo plays a romantic lead, a role akin to the characters he admired in Spike Lee films growing up: "black characters who have a voice who are the center of their own story, there's a poeticism and a lyricism to them, they're three-dimensional," he says. "I love getting to play an ordinary African American who was falling for a woman, and it wasn't about being a player. It was just boy meets girl."

But the best day of his career? That was being pulled from a hillside on the set of Lincoln at Cruise's request to film a last-minute car crash on Jack Reacher. "I had 24 hours where I was with Daniel Day-Lewis and Spielberg by day, (then) Tom sent a jet for me. He was like, 'We've got this stunt, and we need you.'"

"For me, that day kind of crystalized the epitome of what you could hope for as a young actor in Hollywood, because I got to be with, for me, the actor's actor in the shape of Daniel Day-Lewis (playing Lincoln) and the movie star's movie star in the shape of Tom Cruise. It was a moment, shall we say."